5 - ‘Strumming on Two Pianos at Once’: London and the Writing of Red Pottage

Summary

The Mary Cholmondeley myth would never become a cultural industry in the way that the myth of the Brontës did. But such as it was, it could be said to have begun with Red Pottage. In the writing of Diana Tempest, her first important book, she had been concerned mainly with staying one step ahead of the reviewers, knowing they would be quick to pounce on any weakness or ‘ladies' law’ (as indeed had proved the case, despite her care). And she was consciously establishing a position for herself in the literary marketplace, determined to surpass The Danvers Jewels and Sir Charles Danvers, even as she capitalized on their success. She had learned a lot from George Bentley in the ten years of their association.

But in the writing of Tomorrow We Die, which she would later rename less dramatically Red Pottage, she had no amenable publisher with whom to discuss her anxieties or who could give her trusted advice on the marketing of literary fiction. In fact with this book, her most autobiographical to date, she was more concerned with the personal revelations she felt she was making to a curious public. And her sense of herself as a public figure, with the concomitant need to control what would now be termed her ‘image’, would develop in response to the success of this last novel. She was notoriously reluctant to give interviews, but, as a bestselling writer, she would find her background and personality increasingly discussed in the press.

But for now she was intent simply on writing her new novel. Finally she was established in London, as she had always wanted to be. She wrote nothing in her diary for several months after beginning Red Pottage, and so there is no reference to the death of her uncle Charles in January 1897. He had been laid in state in front of the high altar of St Lawrence's Church, Birkenhead, before being buried at Flaybrick Hill Cemetery, with Mary's brothers Tom and Regie, and her uncle Algernon Heber-Percy as chief mourners.